How do I handle credit cards when they reach the maximum number of retries?

Table of contents

Overview

Zuora's payment retry rules allow you to limit the maximum number of automatic retries on credit cards processed through a Zuora payment run. Every time an invalid credit card gets retried for a payment, you (the merchant) get charged for transaction fees by the payment gateway. Costly fees are not the only concern with retrying invalid credit cards too many times; merchants can also trigger fraud warnings from the payment gateway, processor, or credit card networks when attempting too many failed transactions on the same credit card. At worst, fraud warnings can result in your merchant account being marked as high risk and your account may even be put on hold - in which case you won't be able to access the account or use it to process payments. Using Zuora's payment retry rules, you can avoid retrying a credit card after the maximum number of retries has been reached. This article talks about what to do with credit cards that have reached the maximum number of retries. The steps you take to handle such cards are an important part of your payment exception handing process.

Solution

To manage credit cards that have retried the maximum number of retries, you need to define a process where you contact the customer to get the credit card information updated. Some steps you may take include:

Use Zuora's payment method updater to receive automatic updates to Visa and/or Mastercard credit cards. This feature requires you (the merchant) to first sign up with an account updater service provider such as Vantiv, WorldPay, or CyberSource.

Use Zuora's customer notifications feature to alert customers of failed payments so they can provide updated credit card information or an alternative payment method. This feature can also be used to proactively alert customers of payment methods with upcoming expiration dates.

You can call the customer or send them an email asking them to update their payment method (for example if the card has expired, provide a new expiration date) or provide an alternative payment method.

If the customer has changed their address, you may also need to update the address on the payment method.

If a credit card is stolen or the credit card account has been closed, you would create a new credit card and set the new card as the default credit card for the account.

Updating the payment method will reset the payment retry counter and a payment run can be used to process payments using that credit card. In other cases, maybe nothing has changed and it was just a temporary situation where the credit limit has been reached. In that case, you can manually reset the retry counter to 0 by going to the customer account page, find the credit card and click reset (next to Consecutive Failed Payments).